I’ve just been rereading Rupert Furneaux’s 1977 book The Tungus Event about the massive explosion that occurred in the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908. The book does not come to any firm conclusion about the cause, although a meteorite is probably the main suspect. What is the latest thinking on this? I have tried Google but what information there is seems to have been hijacked by the UFO brigade. What caused the explosion?
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The Tunguska whatever-it-was detonated six to eight kilometers above a remote section of the central Siberian plateau on June 30, 1908, at 7:14 AM local time. Herdsmen and traders 60 kilometers away saw a fireball brighter than the sun, felt fierce heat, then heard a deafening explosion. Thirty kilometers away huts were flattened, and people were flung into the air and knocked unconscious. At ground zero herds of reindeer were incinerated and forest fires burned for weeks.
News of the blast was slow to reach the outside world, but there were widespread signs that something odd had happened. The flash was visible 700 kilometers away and tremors from the explosion were recorded at a seismic station over 5,000 kilometers away in Jena, Germany. Anomalies in atmospheric pressure were observed by meteorologists in western Europe and North America, and the night skies over Europe glowed with an abnormal light due to a rare phenomenon called noctilucent (“night-shining”) clouds.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
